Unrest Brought Black Voting Rights

Joanne Bland has lived the history that surrounds her at the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute, a three-story, red-canopied building that borders the Alabama River.

The state police surveillance photos that hang on the walls show marchers gathering outside Brown Chapel AME Church, walking shoulder to shoulder across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, fleeing tear gas unleashed by a blue fence of state troopers.

The photos capture some of the chaos that ensued here on the afternoon of March 7, 1965, the day a march for voting rights for blacks in the Deep South turned into Bloody Sunday.

"First, I heard screams," said Bland, who was 11 when she joined the marchers, "then, what I thought were gunshots. They were shooting the tear gas canisters, I learned from the footage.

"There was so much confusion. But then we started to run. People in front of us were being attacked. We were falling over each other."

A nation saw the clash that day between the state police and marchers, as television crews and photographers captured it. The contrast on the bridge -- belligerent law enforcement officers beating non-threatening church-goers seeking the right to vote -- was as clear as black and white.

It shocked the nation and angered President Lyndon Johnson.

"I would call it a key event in the final stages of the Southern civil rights movement," said Edward P. Morgan, who teaches a class on the 1960s at Lehigh University. "That really triggered the Voting Rights Act, the last piece of civil rights legislation."

Five months after Bloody Sunday, on Aug. 6, 1965, Johnson signed the law that eliminated barriers that kept blacks in the South from voting. It was one defining moment in a decade of defining moments.

From Dallas to Memphis to Los Angeles to Vietnam, the 1960s was a decade of bloodshed and tears.

The sit-ins that began when four black college students refused to move from a whites-only counter in a Woolworth store in Greensboro, N.C., initiated a wave of protests in the South. In 1961, Freedom Riders -- activists who rode buses throughout the South and attempted to integrate public places -- were beaten and their bus was set on fire in Anniston, Ala.

In 1963, a bomb exploded in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., killing four choir girls. That year, authorities there turned their high-power fire hoses on protesters. Three civil rights workers reported missing in 1964 in Mississippi turned up dead. The decade made youthful men martyrs, with the deaths of President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

And more than 58,000 Americans with less famous names died in Vietnam by the war's end.

Images of people arm in arm in the streets, singing freedom songs, are cemented in America's collective memory, as well as scenes of people clashing with police and marching by the thousands on Washington to fight for civil rights, and later, to oppose the unpopular Vietnam War.

Forging social change from civil unrest is symbolic of the decade.

"People acting together to empower themselves -- that's the inspiring part of it," Morgan said.

After Bloody Sunday, the next time Bland, executive director of the voting rights museum, walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge was in 1990, when the museum opened on the 25th anniversary of the march. Memories and emotions overloaded her senses.

"The closer we got to the bridge, the harder my heart beat. When we crested the bridge, all of it started coming back, the tear gas, everything," Bland said.

She can't watch news footage of Bloody Sunday, like that in the film "Eyes on the Prize," shown on a large-screen television at the museum.

"I get mad, feel angry," Bland said. "It affects the way I deal with people, especially with non-African American people. I become immediately defensive. It became, `Oh, no, I'm not going to let you hurt me again.' I knew that it was something I had to deal with.

"I've seen so much change," Bland said. "I know that after I'm gone, there will be more change. What makes me sad is we're about to enter this new century and we still have these same ills. We go from blatant racism to not acknowledging that racism still exists."

A RALLYING CRY

Events in Marion, Ala., in February 1965 set in motion the drama that would climax at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, 30 miles away.

There wouldn't have been a Bloody Sunday without Marion. And no Bloody Sunday, no voting rights legislation, said Albert Turner, a civil rights activist who was helping to organize voter-registration demonstrations there.

"I have no doubt in my mind, this was the spark," said Turner, now 63. "We would have never been on that bridge."